GEORGE HORACE LORIMER AND THE SATURDAY EVENING POST

KIRKUS REVIEW

Record of a professional career rather than the packaging of a personality, which for all its adulation is not without some critical comments. From 1898 to 1936, John Tebbel chronicles events in the life of Lorimer, and underlines the contribution he made not only to the famous ""nickelodeon"" but to magazine history. He notes the accents that were his in the literary, political, advertising and editorial phases of his ""hand-raised"" weekly, of the vigor he brought to it, of the young new writers to whom he offered encouragement, of the battles with other magazines, the handling and nursing of talent, the quality of ""Post luck"" that paralleled his reign, the enthusiasm (or enmity) the ""Boss"" aroused. There are all and sundry things that make up a magazine:- ghosting; the rise of names since famous, Costain, Marquand, Rinehart; the never-ending fight with Bok of The Ladies' Home Journal, his position in Curtis affairs, the political colors under nine presidents, the resistance to change -- and the overall quality of an editor who knew his America. For his contemporaries, who read Lorimer's Letters of a Self-Made Merchant To His Son, to writers and editors to whom the SEP is an institution, this has great reader interest. For writing course students it has importance in the commercial field. And it presents one segment of the American way.

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